About twenty-five years ago, when I was studying and living in Paris, I took a train ride to Wiesbaden, Germany with a friend. I could not tell my family because they would have certainly questioned my right to go at all, as if my mere presence there was an act of premature, unwarranted forgiveness. The emotions behind those sentiments were alive in me, too. I found myself looking at every elderly man and white-haired matron wondering what secrets they concealed. The language they were speaking, that was so harsh to my ears, was not German but Nazi.

I was not proud of these reactions. Most progressive people of my generation had moved beyond the automatic association of Germany with the war. They had even come to see the country as a gentle giant, a good European nation - sort of a Scandinavia on the Rhine. My friends and acquaintances saw the historic hurt inflicted by Germany as the one inflicted in 1972.  Not I, for I am the daughter of a survivor. In my home, names like Krups, Siemens, or Mercedes were words that instantly conjured up the Nazi horror. The places with names like Berlin, Munich, Düsseldorf, and Nuremberg caused chills.

One day, I was about 8 years old and shopping on the Grand Concourse with my mother.  My mother froze in her tracks and stood still for a moment, her mouth hanging open in shock. When I questioned her she said it was nothing. Later at home,  in German- NOT English for this was not meant for the kinder,  she told my father she thought  she saw her aunt who had been killed in the ovens. Such stories, such secrets. The screams at night were adult nightmares – not children’s.

Then, I saw my first documentary footage of the camps. I had walked into the living room as I saw my parents sitting in front of our black and white RCA television.  I watched hundreds of naked bodies, more bone than flesh, being dumped in the bottom of a huge dug-out hole. The skeletons were dropped like garbage into the mass grave. My father lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply, my mother stared intensely at the T.V. as if she might recognize someone she knew.

Yam Hashoah. The Day of Remembrance. Survivors light Yarzeit candles and say Kaddish for the dead. In Israel, a siren goes off at eight A.M. What an eerie sound- so reminiscent of deportation wagons in war movies. For a full minute there is silence. Everything freezes except for the Arab buses and cars.

Here, my mother is one of the women who march in a memorial candle lighting ceremony at her synagogue.  A back veil floats over her face as she lights a white candle for the dead from her city. She is almost eighty-five years old and is just beginning to share her story.